


attempted murder

by angularmomentum



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Animal Transformations, Established Relationship, M/M, assholes in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 08:42:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10760703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: There's no word in English rude enough for “holy shit, my long-term life partner turns into an angry crow once every ten years,” but there fucking should be.





	attempted murder

**Author's Note:**

> did i do this right

-

Sasha has known Nicklas for a pretty long time. He would like to think that he even knows him reasonably well by now, given how many times Nicky has had his stick in Sasha’s various creases in both euphemistic and literal senses. 

It’s pretty much the best, honestly. Sasha thought it might be something good when Nicke was drafted and looked at Sasha like he might murder him at the combine, but then he stayed in Sweden for a year, much to Sasha’s disappointment. He’d been hoping abstractly that Nicky would actually make an attempt on his life so Sasha could wrestle him, which in hindsight was telling in itself about how badly Sasha wanted to get his dick in his mouth. Maybe it was the streaky blonde mullet, but also Sasha thinks nobody should malign the erotic force of being glared at by an unblinking six-foot Swede built like a fridge. 

He was certain it was true lust when Nicky actually came to Moscow. Sasha makes a point to text him often, obviously, because one doesn’t corner one’s crush, offer to sexily wrestle him naked, get his pants off in a hotel room in Columbus Ohio (Slogan: At Least We’re Not Cleveland!) and blow him until he’s screaming in nonsense phrases that are half English and half Swedish and _not_ text him regularly. That would be rude, and Sasha’s mother raised him right. Nicky texts back. Nicky came to Moscow. Nicky let Sasha bite him in all the good places and they cleaned up on the ice like the talented assholes they are. 

Anyway it’s been a while, is the point. Nicky keeps sending him glorious passes and terrorising reporters and bending him aggressively over chairs and smacking him around when he’s been particularly good or bad about something, and Sasha would probably take a skate to the throat for him if he thought Nicky would appreciate it. The true likelihood is that Nicke would yell at him for being dumb enough to get into that position in the first place and then stare fixedly, silently promising death to whichever unfortunate ER doc was sewing Sasha’s jugular back under his skin, but it’s the thought that counts. 

It’s something of a surprise when, sometime towards the November of Nicky’s thirtieth birthday, Nicky takes him out. In the less fun way, which is to say, to dinner, which is still good. 

The restaurant is the one Sasha takes him to when he wants to slide his foot into Nicky’s lap while they’re eating and see how long it takes him to turn pink and start stammering. 

“What’s occasion?” Sasha asks, ordering their usual bottle of vodka and bottle of classy red wine. “Ten year anniversary of our true love? You have new idea for bedroom?”

Sasha likes it when they do this; he likes seeing Nicky in candlelight and with a little split in his lip, next to where he already has a scar. 

He’s been fighting a lot more lately, which Sasha considers to be something of an impugnment on his ability to defend Nicky’s honour, but it’s also punishingly hot. Sasha might have a secret fantasy where Nicky comes to bed in his hockey gear and makes Sasha call him Lars, but he’s waiting for the perfect time to bring it up.

“I have to go home,” Nicky says, which takes the wind right out of Sasha’s sails. 

“What?”

“I have to go home,” Nicky repeats, frostily. He hates repeating himself. 

“Why?”

Nicky sighs heavily. 

When he’s done explaining, Sasha makes him repeat himself. 

-

They end up eating in cold silence because Sasha makes Nicky explain it three times. 

"But you so blonde,” Sasha says, idiotically. 

"I'll remember you said that,” Nicky says, aggressively downing a shot of vodka. “I thought I’d have found a— a solution by now.”

“Is a curse, yes? Not so easy, finding solutions.” Sasha says this as though he knows his ass from his elbow when it comes to witches, which he most definitely does not. Generally, one avoids them in Russia. They tend to be bitter about the whole historical persecution thing, and have this unsettling habit of throwing chicken bones at people, which Alex finds personally distasteful. “What you did for getting cursed?”

“It wasn’t me,” Nicky says flatly. “It’s a family curse.”

“Whole family?”

“Just the youngest child,” Nicky explains. “Anyway, are you going to help me or not?”

“Don’t go home,” Sasha blurts. Nicky opens his mouth, but Sasha cuts him off. “If last time you were home and didn’t fix it, maybe is no point, yes? I stay with you, make sure you okay. We tell Barry you have flu, okay? Is okay. I’m love animals.”

Nicky snaps his teeth closed. 

“Not like that!” Sasha assures him, when Nicky neglects to blink for slightly too long. 

“Pour me a drink,” Nicky commands. “I want to get drunk while I can.”

Sasha obeys, “Is just ten days, no?”

“You try having no concept of time for ten days,” Nicky gripes, downing the shot. “Another.”

Alex has a terrible thought. “Wait, we still fucking tonight?”

“Obviously.” Nicky slams his glass down on the table. 

-

Day one:

There's no word in English rude enough for “holy shit, my long-term life partner turns into an angry crow once every ten years,” but there fucking should be.

One minute, Nicky is standing there, in his living room, where all the couches are Ikea beige because he finds it soothing, naked and rounded and pale. The next, he’s gone, and a crow of distinctly above-average size is grumbling in his place, picking its clawed feet up and squawking at them. 

It fixes Alex with a beady black eye. Even though the colour is wrong, Alex thinks it seems pretty characteristic. 

“Happy birthday?” Sasha offers, still aching all over. It’s 12:01AM, Nicky is thirty years old, and he is a crow. 

“Craw,” Nicky says, which Alex takes to mean “fuck you.”

Alex goes to sleep on the sofa after making sure all the windows and doors are closed, Nicky riding on his shoulder and biting his ear whenever Alex does something displeasing, like touch his thermostat. 

It really would feel weird taking a crow to bed.

Day two:

Sasha takes a personal day, which he feels he’s entitled to. Given a few days of warning, he’s cleared most of his schedule, but he’s not exactly accustomed to long swathes of free time. 

Nicky’s house has little in the way of entertainment, because all the books are in Swedish and Nicky himself is a crow, and therefore not particularly diverting company. 

Sasha is a dog person. He knows a lot about dogs. He loves dogs. People sometimes uncharitably compare him to a werewolf, which Sasha feels is unfair but secretly flattering. If he were a werewolf it’s highly unlikely he’d be allowed to play in the NHL, given their superior reflexes and inconveniently lunar sleep schedules, but Sasha is still pleased to be considered an honorary member of the club. 

That being said, his love of animals has not historically extended to birds. He can honestly say he’s not thought much about birds beyond how they taste, but Nicky makes a reasonably pleasing-looking crow, as crows go. 

He’s iridescent black and very glossy, and large enough to be a significant weight when he stands on Sasha’s chest and pecks at his teeth when Sasha is paying too much attention to his phone. “What?” Sasha asks. “You hungry? Thirsty?”

A thought occurs: Sasha does not know what preferences are considered normal for birds for bathroom use aside from just letting fly from the sky, and he does not want to ask. He’s pretty sure he left at least one toilet seat up. 

Nicky makes a crackling sort of screech and positions himself so he can see the screen of Sasha’s phone. 

He pecks at the screen.  
“What?” Sasha asks, exasperated. “You hate my music.”

Nicky fluffs his feathers, then sticks his head under a wing as though painfully exasperated. 

“Here,” Sasha offers, “we play words with friends, you peck me when I wrong.”

Nicky digs his claws into Sasha’s chest and fixates on the screen again. 

Sasha takes that as agreement and opens the app. By the end of an hour his fingers are bleeding and Nicky, somehow, looks enormously satisfied.

Day three:

“Wait,” Sasha says, when Nicky is eating a hunk of raw meat Sasha has solicitously defrosted for him. “Is this why you not come to America right after you drafted?”

“Caw,” Nicky says, before sinking his talons into the steak and ripping a strip off it with his beak.

“What your family did for this?”

Nicky fixes him with a flat, birdy stare. 

“Yes, okay, maybe I’m asking too late. You never ask?”

Nicky does not dignify that with an answer, because he is a bird.

Day four: 

Sasha, given his preferences, is secretly a morning person. That doesn’t mean he wants to be woken up by a pounding on the door at six in the morning, because it sends Nicky into a literal flap. 

He launches himself off the couch in a flurry of black feathers and perches, fluffed to twice his normal size, on top of the curtains in the living room while Sasha goes to see what all the fuss is about. 

He hopes it’s not the press. Witches get a pretty bad rap in America too, something to do with Jesus or whatever. It has never been a top priority for Sasha to learn the nuances, but it stands to reason that if the press found out about the curse Nicky would have a lot of talking to do, which is his least favourite thing, so Sasha has opted for “secret staycation” instead of putting Nicky on his shoulder like a pirate and going around downtown for some truly epic Instagram opportunities. 

He peers through the peephole and is relieved to see Burky and Wilson and three of Sasha’s five dogs, which they are babysitting. 

“Ovi?” Wilson asks, through the door. “One of them chewed a condom packet, but we don’t know if she ate one!”

Sasha, alarmed, opens the door. 

The three dogs surge in, delighted to see him. Sasha is too busy yelling “why you not call me? Why you let them near condoms! Why you‘re here and not at the vet!?” to remember that large dogs and large birds might not be the best combination. 

The dogs start barking. Burky starts apologising, then stops when the large black crow that is Nicky dive-bombs him with great prejudice. 

“Jesus fucking christ!” Tom yells covering his head, even though that means he’s let go of three leashes and there are now three dogs running around in barky circles while Nicky, who is not thrilled about dogs at the best of times, flies right out the door. 

“Why is there a bird in papa’s house?” Burky asks, chasing a dog into the bathroom and cornering her while Sasha gets the other two. Tom, uselessly, is standing in the corner with his hands over his head. 

“Long story,” Sasha says, herding him towards the door. “Take them to vet! Send me bill! Don’t leave condoms out where dogs can eat them!”

“Is that—“ Tom asks, when Nicky settles into the biggest tree in his front yard. 

“No,” Sasha lies. “Is not your problem, go away, take dogs with you, call me.”

Sasha manages to get rid of them. 

There are feathers all over the living room. There are rips in the sofa and stuffing is spilling out in gentle puffs. 

Sasha decides he needs coffee to deal with this, and also possibly professional help. 

Sasha promised he wouldn’t tell anyone, but this calls for drastic measures, especially if Tom has begun to figure it out. Sasha pulls out his phone. There are eight missed calls from Burky, which explains why they came over in the first place. Sasha must have been more tired than he realised to sleep through them. 

He grits his teeth, and scrolls down his contacts. 

“What?” Zhenya says, voice sleep-rough. “Why are you bothering me?”

“Weird question,” Sasha warns him, “but what do you know about curses.”

“Sasha, did you trespass? You know you’re not meant to—“

“No, no. I’m not cursed!” He looks outside, to where Nicky is still sitting very still in a very bare-looking tree. “Asking for a friend.”

There is a long silence from Pittsburgh. “You sure it’s not sexually transmitted?”

“That’s a thing that can happen?”

Zhenya sighs. “What happened to Nicky?”

“He’s a crow,” Sasha tells him. 

“I have to call my grandmother,” Zhenya says. “Make sure you keep an eye on him. People aren’t supposed to be animals, you know. They don’t know how to survive in the wild. He’s going to break some crow rule and get murdered.”

“…Was that a joke?”

“You’re the worst,” Zhenya says. “I’ll get back to you.”

Day five:

“Nicky, please come back inside?”

Nicky screeches aggressively at him. 

“Is November!” Sasha yells. “You want to freeze?”

Nicky puffs up to twice his size, as if to say “try me.”

Sasha goes back inside, but he leaves all the big windows open.

Zhenya still hasn’t called back, so Sasha does the unthinkable and turns to the internet. 

_What do crows like?_ yields several unpromising results. He doesn’t think Nicky likes worms, or crickets, or spiders much. In fact, Nicky is not much of an animal person, which makes it deeply ironic that he is now technically an animal. 

Finally, Sasha lands on a result that seems promising, and he has just the jeans for the job.

Day Six:

A weight lands on his chest and immediately starts picking at the bedazzled design on his shirt. 

Normally, Sasha could win bets on how little time it takes for Nicky to deride his fashion choices, but it turns out crows love sparkly stuff. 

“I’m never let you live this down,” Sasha tells him. “Never ever.”

Nicky does not dignify that with an answer, ripping a rhinestone off Sasha’s second-favourite Gucci shirt and flying off to put it with the rest of his sequins on top of the curtains.

Day seven: 

“My grandmother says you’re an idiot,” Zhenya says, without so much as a hello. “She also says nobody curses a whole family unless they’ve stolen something, or taken a service without paying.”

“Witches are capitalists? No wonder—“

“Stop talking,” Zhenya says. “Youngest child, time-limited? Yes?”

Sasha is fairly certain Zhenya can read, and says so, given the string of texts Sasha has been sending him that his phone informs him Zhenya has seen. “Yes.”

“Then you’re fucked,” Zhenya informs him. “It’s in the bloodline now. He probably has to give up his lastborn child or something. Not worth it, you know? Ten days every ten years is a low price. Also, he’s a crow, and crows can live anywhere.”

“Give up a child to who?” Sasha is unreasonably outraged on Nicklas’ behalf. “It’s not even his fault!” 

“Or it’s devotion curse,” Zhenya says cautiously. 

“A what?”

“Don’t be dense,” Zhenya sighs heavily. Sasha can picture him rolling his eyes. “How long have you been fucking?”

“First of all, that’s a rumour—“

“Sasha.”

“Nine years,” Sasha mutters. “Off and on.”

“Do you love him?”

Sasha glances at where Nicky has built a nest of couch stuffing and jewels on top of his boring grey curtains. He’s reasonably sure Nicky is listening, but he doesn’t know how well crows hear, or whether he can hear Zhenya. “Yes, obviously. I’m taking care of a crow, who is my—”

“Find that last word quick, I’d say,” Zhenya tells him. “In my unprofessional opinion, maybe this stops when someone commits a devotion to the cursed. Don’t quote me, I’m not a witch, and if you say I come from witches I’ll tell everyone exactly how many piercings you have and where they are on your body.”

“Wait but—“

“I just told you—“

“Why a crow? Why just the youngest? Why every ten years?”

“Ask the original caster,” Zhenya says, “but usually it’s something that makes someone difficult to love. Maybe a youngest-child ancestor was a thief, or a vulture, or hell, an executioner, how am I supposed to know. How come you’ve never asked Nicky?”

“I didn’t know about it!”

“Maybe he thinks it makes him difficult to love, hmm?”

Sasha almost drops his phone. “Do I owe your grandmother anything?”

Zhenya laughs. “Well done. I’ll send you the bill. One more thing? Do it while he’s still a crow. That’s how these things work.”

Day eight:

Sasha spends the day researching devotion curses, and comes up with a lot of bunk about love potions. 

Nicky eats a bug in front of him. 

Sasha has a bad dream about large crows coming to peck out his nose hair, and wakes up to Nicky pushing his beak through his fringe. It feels kind of nice. 

Day nine:

Nicky has gone through all the steak in his fridge and destroyed all of Sasha’s most bedazzled t-shirts. 

“I had no idea crows ate so much,” Sasha says to him. 

Nicky hops onto Sasha’s forearm, claws digging little divots into his skin. Sasha strokes a finger over the top of his glossy head. 

_I love you,_ he thinks, feeling the softness of the feathers under his fingertips. “You a terror,” he says instead, because he’s not sure that counts as an act of devotion. 

Day ten: 

It’s hard to spoon a crow but Sasha makes it work. 

It’s probably something for concern that it’s no longer weird to take a bird to bed, but that’s something Sasha will care about later, when he has more time. 

Sasha would not describe himself as a romantic, necessarily, or even as a person driven much by instinct. He’s talented and amazing and has played hockey for so long that it looks from the outside as though it’s instinctual to him, but it isn’t. Sasha has _practiced_ thank you very much. Sasha has _worked._

Magic is much more primal than he was prepared for when he volunteered to chaperone Nicky in semi-helpless bird form. He’d thought, truthfully, that it might be kind of funny, in the deepest reaches of his mind, and while that has played out at least tenfold,  
in the end, Sasha is just scared. 

What will happen in ten years’ time, when Nicky is forty, and they might not be playing together anymore, and he might not have parents anymore? What happens in twenty years when he’s fifty, and they might not even know each other anymore. 

Sasha can’t stand the idea, it turns out. He can’t imagine not getting to see Nicky age, to watch the little — ha — the little crow’s feet appear in the creases of his eyes, or the lines deepen by his mouth, or the threads of grey appear in his light hair and turn it white. 

He can’t imagine not wanting to spend a lifetime watching Nicky’s secret smiles and feeling the force of his unimpressed glares and watching the genuine joy he gets out of eating authentic Swedish food even though it all tastes like the glue some of the kids in Sasha’s kindergarten class used to eat. 

He gets up, makes coffee with Nicky’s futuristic coffee machine, defrosts something that is labelled in Swedish on the box but looks like it might be meatballs for Nicky, and sits down at the kitchen table to watch him swallow raw flesh flesh whole.

“I’m devoted to you,” Sasha says, because that’s true. It’s the raw, honest truth. “I don’t care if you a bird. I don’t care if you cursed, or if you maybe have to give some witch a child. We not having any by accident.” Nicky tilts his head, meat hanging from his beak, fixing Sasha with one eye. He holds still in that way only birds seem to be able to, not even a feather moving. “I love you,” Sasha confesses. “Maybe you not feel the same, is okay. Maybe is just sex, but I love you.”

Nicky drops the meat in his beak just in time to become a man again, naked and standing on the kitchen table in front of his half-eaten breakfast. Sasha doesn’t even have time to be relieved before the table tips over from his weight, sending him flying backwards and launching Sasha’s coffee in a wide, dazzling arc all over the ceiling. 

“Asshole,” Nicky wheezes, flat on his back on the tile, covered in coffee and meatballs and some stray black feathers drifting down to rest against his pale, familiar skin. 

-

Day one:

Nicky drags Sasha into the shower with him. 

He still hasn’t gotten the hang of speaking back, and he keeps making strange noises that might be attempts at crow noises, but his throat isn’t right for those anymore. Aside from single words, Nicky is silent, and Sasha doesn’t want to ask him the barrage of questions he has yet, before Nicky can answer them. 

Instead, he washes Nicky’s hair for him when Nicky guides his hands there and hands him a shampoo bottle. He presses his chest to Nicky’s back, presses his hands to Nicky’s chest after he’s rinsed the foam out of his hair and out of his eyes, after he’s smoothed his fingers over Nicky’s very human lips and nose and eyebrows. 

Nicky leans back against him and doesn’t say a word, but he does make a high, pleased noise when Sasha wraps a conditioner-slick around him and tighten his grip. “That’s good,” Nicky manages, leaning his head back on Sasha’s shoulder. 

Nicky goes right back to sleep as soon as they’re done and clean and Sasha has taken care of himself. 

Once, Sasha might have thought it was weird to watch Nicky sleep, but the scale of weirdness has tilted right off its axes, and so he does. 

He’s often thought Nicky looks a little bit as though someone once convinced a fae to take a human form but the fae got it slightly wrong and ended up with a delicate, beautiful face on top of the body of a Greek wrestler, but that has never really been a bad thing. If anything, his angles or lack of them have always been a source of fascination for Sasha. Funny that it took Nicky becoming a crow for him to realise that he wants to see Nicky’s weird face forever. 

-

Nicky wakes up at dusk and smack Sasha in the chest. 

“Wake up,” he says, seemingly verbal again. “What time is it?”

“Six thirty,” Sasha mutters, grabbing his hand and lacing their fingers together. 

Nicky submits to hand holding, which tells Sasha as much as he needs to know about how tired Nicky still must be. 

“Did you mean it?” Nicky asks, face half-pressed into the pillow, one eye visible, green and stark and not birdlike at all. 

“Yes,” Sasha tells him. “You think I break curse if I’m not meaning it?”

Nicky is silent for a while, still staring, still gripping Sasha’s hand. “I have to mean it too, for it to work.”

Sasha swallows, relief blooming verdant under his chest. “We give it ten years, find out then?”

“No,” Nicky says, closing his eye. “I know it worked.”

“You not going to say it?” Sasha says, teasing a little. 

Nicky huffs, an echo of outrage in his sigh. “Fine. I love you too.”

“I’m devoted to you,” Sasha reminds him. “The most devoted. Am best at devotion.”

“I know,” Nicky mutters, gripping his hand tighter despite the bite in his words. “Crows never forget.”

“Not elephants?” Sasha seems to remember that being elephants. 

“Who’s the crow here,” Nicky gripes, finally making a token effort to push the blankets off, letting go of Sasha’s hand. “We hold grudges too, don’t test me.”

“Now I believe you,” Sasha says, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth. 

“Good” Nicky mutters, kissing him back. “Now get the hell up and make me dinner.”

-

**Author's Note:**

> no dogs were harmed in the writing of this fic


End file.
